BRITISH SOCCER: THE DEADLY GAME

WE WERE IN THE ARSENAL STADIUM IN North London. Arsenal was playing Manchester United, and losing, 1-0. A few yards away from us, the Manchester fans were howling for victory. Pete, seated behind me, was not pleased.

The curses came pouring out of him as the hometeam players flubbed the ball - a torrent of Anglo-Saxon words that contorted his face into masks of fury. Sexual threats rang mightily in my ears.

''You bleedin' idiot. You couldn't score in a brothel!''

He stopped short when I caught his eye, and shrugged apologetically. ''Sorry, love,'' he said, ''I get a bit carried away, if you know what I mean. You all right, then?''

His mate Mike gave me what was intended to be a reassuring pat on the shoulder. There were snakes tattooed on the back of his hand. ''Welcome to football,'' he said. And grinned.

Forget about English notions of fair play. The ringing chorus of boos that had greeted the opposing team when they set foot on the field was a standard ritual, but it caught me off guard. I was back in England after 10 years in the States, where I had gotten used to the family atmosphere of baseball; there, the worst that happens to the visiting team is a deadly silence when they score, play stops when a beach ball is thrown onto the field.

Now that I thought of it, there were very few families here at the Arsenal home ground. Not many women at all. Or young children. Or blacks. The 35,000-strong crowd, packed into a structure the size of a small spring training stadium in Florida, consisted almost entirely of white men aged 15 to 30. All with lusty lungs for cursing and shouting, and lusty bellies filled with strong English ale. I was glad I'd brought a friend - a big friend, Hugh, whom I'd known since college.

It was a big game: Arsenal was one place ahead of Manchester, very near the top of the first division, and a win would make a big difference to (Continued on Page 66) either side. But that's not why I was here. I hadn't been to a soccer match since I'd left England, though I used to go quite often in Manchester and Liverpool, where I spent my student years, and I remembered kids like Pete and Mike. There was something about their enthusiasm that attracted me, despite the violence with which they expressed it. Their vigorous language was free of the repression that's so characteristic of England. They were 18 or 19, they were uneducated, they were already stuck in dead-end jobs or living on the dole, but for the space of a Saturday afternoon, they could forget all that and openly, loudly and raucously enjoy themselves. There was no holding back. This was mainly a working-class crowd, uninterested in the stifling niceties of upper- and middle-class life. This was another England - the England ignored or conveniently forgotten by Anglophiles, who find it hard to reconcile their upper-class fantasies with lower-class reality. There was no masking here. No embarrassment. That was the pleasure of it, and that's why the stadium was crammed. Football - soccer to my American ear - is where the emotional restrictiveness of being English breaks down. This is where you can let go.

Within limits, that is. This was football in the 1980's, and uniformed police ringed the pitch, spaced about five yards apart from each other. Both teams' colors were red and white, and the whole stadium would have been a sea of those colors if it hadn't been for the lines of navy blue police uniforms. They circled the terraces behind the goals at either end of the pitch.

Fans pay $:4 (about $7) for the privilege of standing on one of these terraces - huge, concrete-stepped structures open to the sky. You have to come early to get a good place on a terrace, and once you have found it, you can't leave. You need a strong bladder, or a willingness to stand on wet concrete pungent with urine.

From our seats, we could see that both terraces were packed and people were pushing to the front, just as they would a year later at Sheffield, when 95 people were crushed to death. Visitors and home team had been carefully separated from the start. At one end were the Arsenal fans, cheering and jeering. At the other, Manchester United fans jeering and cheering to match. Chanted insults were traded back and forth the length of the pitch, as though medieval armies were trumpeting their calls to arms across the field of battle. A huge inflatable banana got big play in the Arsenal terrace. It was raised high and jiggled up and down whenever Manchester's star player neared the goal. A chorus of monkey noises went up, and the fans started jumping up and down and scratching under their arms. The player was black.

Each side of the pitch is lined with higher-priced stands, where despite the name, you sit. The stands are not strictly segregated, apparently on the theory that those with a little more money are less prone to violence. We were seated at one end, right up beside the Manchester United terrace, where the thousands of fans who'd followed their team south were penned in between high steel fences - crowd-control fences like the ones at Sheffield. Empty concrete strips border the terrace, deliberately fenced off to act as a no man's land. The idea is to keep opposing fans apart. The units of policemen stand in the otherwise empty strips. Their very presence seems like a challenge.

Suddenly there was an Arsenal attack - a pass, another pass, a header toward the goal, then another that slipped in past the goalie. The stadium went wild. I hardly registered the goal being scored before Pete and Mike behind me were standing on their seats, swaying and jumping up and down and stomping, gyrating their pelvises and making obscene signs with their arms. Eyes glazed, fists punching the air, they weren't looking at the pitch. They weren't paying attention to the players. They were focused entirely on the Manchester United terrace just a few yards away from us. It was like some tribal dance in deepest darkest Africa, the kind of dance they don't even do anymore except for the sake of earnest documentary makers with video cameras - a combination war and fertility dance, and apparently just as heady.

Penned behind their fences, the Manchester supporters responded in kind, spurring the Arsenal fans to more contortions. Pete, wearing huge heavy work boots, was bouncing up and down on his seat. I heard the seat crack. The police were braced for action now. Poker-faced, they moved in slightly, threatening. The referees rushed to get the game started again. The ball went into play; somebody got in a good pass; the crowd cheered; the victory moment passed.

Pete and Mike settled back into their seats, flushed and panting and pleased with themselves, still muttering about bleeders, and took up the chant that was now sweeping over the Arsenal terraces and stands.

''Here we go, here we go, here we go . . .'' they chanted. The tune, disconcertingly, was ''The Stars and Stripes Forever.''

Hugh, my companion, visibly untensed beside me.

So did the police. For now.

AT FIRST, IT seemed like football as it used to be. We had joined the streams of people walking toward the stadium, through the narrow street lined with drab little two-story terrace houses, the kind of houses where people hunch around the fire in the front parlor and delay going to the bathroom because it's so cold in there, basically just a shed built onto the back of the house. Houses with porcelain ducks hung on the walls, and a portrait of the Queen, and a fence in the back garden just high enough for privacy, just low enough so that neighbors can stand and chat over it as they wonder whether to take in the washing now or risk it for another half-hour before it starts raining again.

The streets surrounding the stadium were packed. Hawkers sold programs, team buttons, hats and scarves. Everyone seemed in a good mood. Genial. Comfortable. So that at first I didn't even notice the video cameras set on the roofs of some of the houses, pointed into the street. Police cameras.

I bought a portion of chips in a local fish-and-chips shop, drenched them in vinegar, and was sharing them with Hugh when I saw the mounted police riding through the crowd, the helmeted riders in luminous green capes.

We went into the stadium about half an hour before kickoff time. There were separate turnstiles for the terraces and the stands, and a lot of police by the turnstiles. They were frisking everyone who went onto the terraces. Occasionally, they'd take one or two fans aside and frisk them far more thoroughly. The frisking was quick, efficient, polite and insistent. And necessary.

The list of weapons found on football fans in the last few years includes the following:

For some reason, the darts are the weapons that get to me most. It's the horror-movie nightmare of something so familiar becoming so threatening. A pub game suddenly becomes lethal. It reminds me of the terrible refinement on kneecapping practiced in Northern Ireland, which involves drilling through a man's kneecap with an electric drill.

PERHAPS THE CONFLICT in Northern Ireland has taken its toll on England. More likely, football violence is a reaction to the prim properness of Margaret Thatcher's determinedly middle-class regime, which has created legions of permanently unemployed young working-class men with lots of energy and lots of aggression, and no way to express it. They never subscribed to the rigid, formulaic politeness of English middle-class life - a politeness motivated less by consideration of others than by the will to repress. In a sense, football violence is a huge, obscene gesture directed at the ruling classes, at the rigid structure of English society. It is a working-class howl and, like most howls of the powerless, it ends up hurting them more than anyone else.

A couple of days earlier, I'd spent eight hours in the morgue of The Times of London, going through the clippings on football violence in the past 10 years. The morgue - the journalistic term for the archive - was in one of the basements of the new Times complex in Wapping, part of London's renovated Docklands area.

I accumulated many facts. Darts have been thrown at opposing goalies and at referees. Referees and linesmen have been beaten up by fans. Bottles, sharpened coins and bricks have been hurled at players. But all of that is nothing compared to what opposing fans have done to each other.

A brief sample: In January 1986, a busful of Millwall supporters was returning to London after a game in the north. It stopped at a motorway service station just as two buses of Newcastle United fans pulled in. Millwall had played Sunderland, not Newcastle that day, but 30 Millwall fans nevertheless went crazy. They trashed the cafeteria, then leaped on Alan Price, a 27-year-old geologist, as he stepped out of a phone booth, and beat him to a pulp. They then scattered business cards over him - printed, embossed cards reading, ''Congratulations, you have just met the Bushwhackers.''

Millwall had lost its match that day; Newcastle had won. In October 1986, 19-year-old Ken Burns had the temerity to shout ''Up West Ham'' in the face of Millwall supporters on a rampage through London's West End after a Millwall-West Ham game. They chased him into the Embankment tube station and stabbed him six times. He died on the way to the hospital.

West Ham had won 2-1. In May 1985, Liverpool United fans attacked fans of the Juventus team from Turin, Italy, in the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, just before the start of a European Cup final game. As the opposing fans fought a pitched battle, throwing bottles and bricks, those below them on the terraces panicked and surged forward. A retaining wall collapsed. The Liverpool fans pressed their attack. Thirty-nine people were rampled and suffocated to death. Four hundred and fifty were injured. Twenty-six Liverpool fans were eventually indicted on manslaughter charges in Belgium.

Liverpool lost 1-0.

AFTER HEYSEL, ENGLISH SOC-cer clubs were banned from Europe, where football violence is known as ''the English disease.'' The national team could still compete, but organized fans were not allowed to travel with them. It was three years later, in the spring of 1988, that I found myself at Arsenal. England was soon to meet West Germany in the European Cup. Among the T-shirts on sale outside the stadium that weekend was one showing an English soccer hooligan on the front, beer in one hand and brick in the other, with the slogan ''England on Tour.'' On the back, it said ''England - Invasion of Germany, 1988.''

The fans say that they have to ''show'' opposing countries. The ways in which they have ''showed'' them since the mid-70's, in cities throughout the Netherlands, France, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland and Luxembourg, would once have caused wars. Hundreds have been injured, dozens arrested. Seats have been ripped up and hurled onto the field. British fans have urinated on opposing fans. They've rampaged through the streets, smashing windows, looting stores and setting cars on fire. They've trashed ferries, trains and coaches. And as they did all this, they often chanted ''War, war, war!''

At Heysel, some of the English fans wore swastika armbands. In London's Chelsea Stadium, you can see Nazi salutes being given from the terraces. The National Front, England's neo-Nazi organization, sees soccer matches as a perfect recruiting ground, and a Young National Front magazine, Bulldog, became a soccer hooligan's bible in the early 80's when it began a ''League of Louts'' in which rival fans vied in retailing their exploits.

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The police responded to all this by going underground, using classic infiltration techniques. From 1985 on, they uncovered a half-dozen fan gangs, including the Lunatic Fringe of Derby County, the Gooners of Arsenal and the Yiddos of Tottenham Hotspur.

Yes, the Yiddos. A name adopted in bravado by a bunch of neo-Nazi thugs. There's not a Jew among them, but the Tottenham Hotspur stadium is close to Stamford Hill, where most of London's Orthodox Jews live, and the club's owner is Jewish. Opposing teams call them the Yids, and opposing fans chant ''We hate the Yids'' with great relish throughout a game.

Hardly anyone in England, even most Jews, thinks this particularly worthy of comment. It's just a nickname, they say, there's nothing behind it. Not even when the National Front recruits at soccer matches? When the swastika is seen on the terraces? When you can hear chants like ''Kill the Yids''? It doesn't really mean anything, I was told. It's not worth the trouble of making a fuss. You shouldn't even mention it, really. Among the gangs arrested en masse were Birmingham City's Zulu Warriors, who gave their version of a Zulu chant as they charged their victims and rampaged through shopping centers as well as football grounds. Thirty-six were arrested. Their business card read: ''Zapped by a Zulu.''

Then there were the Chelsea Head-Hunters. They had crossbows and rifles in their arsenal, as well as the more conventional spiked maces and machetes. ''You have been nominated and dealt with by the Chelsea Head-Hunters,'' said their card.

But the gang that attracted the most attention was the Inter-City Firm - West Ham supporters whose weaponry included Bren guns and spiked balls and chains. They traveled by Inter-City train to away games, usually first class. They were the largest of the gangs identified so far, with 145 members, the majority of them in regular jobs - a fact which seemed to dispel the idea that soccer hooliganism was solely the result of unemployment. Among their members were a bank manager, building contractors, manufacturers, importers, solicitors' clerks, an insurance underwriter and eight British Army soldiers, one of them a sergeant.

Their business card went for a classily understated tone: ''You have been visited by the I.C.F.''

Spiked balls and chains? Studded maces? Crossbows? Darts? Just the list of weapons reads like something out of ''Mad Max'' or ''A Clockwork Orange'' - bleakly futuristic movies come to life on the football turf of England today. The anarchic gangs, the medieval weaponry, the surrealism of the embossed business cards, the random violence, the primitive tribalism. . . . This is a new kind of England, ready to shatter old myths at the least provocation. Anglophiles beware.

PETE AND MIKE were not pleased. The score was 2-1 in favor of Manchester, and there were only five minutes left to play. A sullen resentment was building behind me, mutterings of ''We'll get yer, yer bunch of bleeding idiots.''

The public address system crackled to life. ''We request visiting supporters to wait five minutes after the game. At that time, you will be escorted safely off the grounds.''

''What happens then?'' I asked. ''You'll see,'' Pete said. They were going wild on the Manchester terraces, jumping and screaming and singing and chanting, waving banners and fists. The police were in a nearly solid ring around the pitch now, facing out toward the crowd.

They were determined not to have trouble. The week before, at this same stadium, Arsenal had played Millwall. There had been 42,000 packed in then, though it's hard to see where; the stadium seemed full to capacity right now, with 35,000. When trouble started, the police had charged the crowd. Forty-one fans were arrested, 73 were thrown out of the grounds, and two neighborhood pubs were trashed. Both fans and police were injured. That happened with only 500 police on hand. There were more today.

When the police really expect trouble, you can get up to a thousand men on duty at a game. It's expensive. The year before, police presence at games had cost $:20 million (about $34 million) just in overtime pay, not including investment in closed-circuit television systems inside the grounds, video cameras outside, body scanners, metal detector gates in some stadiums and extra fencing. On a regular Saturday, when only a couple of ''flashpoint'' games are being played, there could be 4,500 men on duty, at a cost of more than $:1 per fan. If the luck of the draw indicates more flashpoints - games between clubs whose supporters have bad records for hooliganism - the numbers and the cost of crowd control rise accordingly.

And no matter how many police there are, they can't stop incidents like the one in Glasgow, where a minibus full of Celtics supporters drove by mistake through a neighborhood stronghold of archrival Rangers fans. A hail of stones hit the bus; one Celtics man was stoned to death.

SINCE A SOLID triple line of police now blocked all possible exits from the Manchester terrace, the P.A. request was in fact an order. It was hard to tell if the Manchester fans were being protected or imprisoned.

The rest of us filed out slowly through the narrow corridors of the antiquated stadium. It was dark already - the last half-hour of the game had been played under floodlights. Out in the open, exits from the home stands and terraces led toward a major gate to the street, underneath the steeply stepped concrete structure of the main Arsenal terrace.

''Don't go too far to the right,'' said Hugh. ''You don't want to get under the terrace.''

I looked up where he was pointing and saw the lights glinting on three streams of urine arching high in the air.

The force of the crowd carried us on. Pete and his mates had been carried off in another direction. I saw a boy of about 6 clinging to his father's hand, staring up wide-eyed in anxiety at the press of people around him. I wanted to spread my arms wide to give him space, but I couldn't. There was no space. Out in the street, I took a deep breath. It was nighttime, but there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of light. And noise. It got louder and louder, bouncing back and forth in the narrow street between the rows of houses. Then it took shape: a helicopter, methodically flying low over the streets lining the stadium, with a strong searchlight picking out every detail as it went.

And now I could see just how many police were out here. Hundreds of them on foot, and dozens of mounted riot police. The horses were huge - far larger than New York City police horses. And everywhere I looked, police dogs - big Alsatian attack dogs - sat quietly, ready for command.

The police were moving everyone toward the underground train station as quickly as they could. They'd blocked some streets, and they looked as though they knew what they were doing.

''Excuse me, Officer,'' I said to a policeman in the middle of the road. ''I'm from New York, and I was wondering what's happening here. It all looks very impressive. . . .''

Between messages into his two-way radio, he explained the operation to me. It was indeed very impressive. In fact, it was a full paramilitary operation, carried out in tandem by the Metropolitan Police force and the British Transport Police.

The plan called for complete physical separation of Arsenal and Manchester fans. They were taken into the underground station from different sides, on alternate trains - one for Arsenal, one for Manchester, one for Arsenal, and so on. The police controlled the station entrance, and now they were moving everyone in sight onto the pavement, behind a solid line of police officers, police dogs and police horses. The road itself soon belonged entirely to the police.

The helicopter circled, flying low, and the searchlight swung over us. It was eerily quiet. Thirty-five thousand fans who'd spent the last two hours shouting and booing, cheering and singing, had gone completely silent. The only sounds to be heard were the throb of the helicopter, the clopping of horses' hoofs and the crackle of police radios. And one other sound, a low undertone to the more obvious ones: the muffled shuffling of feet moving slowly along the pavements.

I looked for Pete and Mike, but it was hard to tell anyone apart under these circumstances. Everyone looked the same: hunched shoulders, shadowy faces, cowed and subdued.

''I'm so ashamed you should see football this way,'' said the policeman. ''They're morons, the lot of them -complete morons. They say you have to go to South America to see good football nowadays. It seems they really know about crowd control there.''

Over on the other side of the station, another long line of shadowy gray faces and shuffling feet appeared. The Manchester United fans had been released from their terraces, taken out another entrance, then shepherded the long way around the block to approach the station behind the triple police barrier. None of them were singing any more.

The transport police reported that a train had come through and taken the Arsenal fans on the platform. The station was clear. Manchester fans filed in, while Arsenal fans waited in sullen silence. The helicopter continued its surveillance. The horses stomped and circled in the street. The radio crackled.

''They don't even know what football is,'' said the policeman. ''They only know violence. I remember coming to games with my dad, and it was a joy. I mean, it was part of being a kid, you know? But I wouldn't bring my son to a game now. If he wants to see football, he has to watch it on the television. That's what these morons have done to football. They've taken it away from those of us who really love the game.''

A train came in and loaded up with Manchester fans. The transport police searched the station and made sure it was clear, then more Arsenal fans were allowed in. It was a model exercise in riot control. No arrests, no violence. Just the dispiriting sight of hunched people shuffling forward under a searchlight, watched by hundreds of police. Within 45 minutes of the end of the game, there wasn't a football fan in sight.

Lesley Hazleton is a visiting professor at Pennsylvania State University. This article is adapted from her book ''England, Bloody England,'' to be published in the fall by Atlantic Monthly Press.

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A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 1989, on Page 6006040 of the National edition with the headline: BRITISH SOCCER: THE DEADLY GAME. Today's Paper|Subscribe